Masood Raja

Originally from Pakistan, Dr. Masood Ashraf Raja is an Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory at the University of North Texas and the author of "The Religious Right and the Talibanization of America" (Palgrave, 2016).
Raja tweets @masoodraja

Interview contributed by Maggie Ronkin, Georgetown University Q1. Could you share a brief history of the kind of work you did before joining the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center? In 1968, I joined the struggle for social change in Pakistan as a campus activist at Punjab University, Lahore. I hailed from an extremely conservative religious…

Interview contributed by Maggie Ronkin, Georgetown University Q1. Could you share a brief history of the kind of work you did before joining the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center? In 1968, I joined the struggle for social change in Pakistan as a campus activist at Punjab University, Lahore. I hailed from an extremely conservative religious…

Having heard and watched various actions of the so-called Tea party Movement and the Republican leaders trying to tap into this movement for the next election, I could not help but notice some drastic inconsistencies in their self-presentation. What we are being told is that these people are angry with big government and wary of…

It is now the second year of Pakistaniaat’s publication. I thought I should take this opportunity to reflect upon our first year and share some thoughts about our future. The Decision to Start a Journal Pakistaniaat, as might be obvious by now, was not really launched on a whim. As a scholar of Pakistani origin…

It just occurred to me today that after having published two successful issues using the Open Access Platform provided by Scholarly Exchange (SE), our hosting company, I have not publicly acknowledged our debt of gratitude to this wonderful not-for-profit organization. Here is some information about them cited directly from their website: Scholarly Exchange emerged in…

Yesterday’s bombing of the National Bank was so close to my home that had I been there I would have felt the tremor and heard the blast from my room. What the newspapers have failed to mention is that this particular bank branch primarily dealt with the pension accounts of army retirees. So, most of…

Those of you not familiar with the area and the operational strategy of the Pakistan army may benefit from this brief operational analysis. The Pakistan army is conducting Advance-to-Contact operations on three axes: East: Jandola-Kotkai-Sararogha axis. South-West: Wana-Shakai axis North: Razmak-Makeen-Sararogha axis. The purpose of an Advance-to-Contact operation always is to move into the hostile…

It is now clear, as per the latest statement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal–the US commander in Afghanistan–that all those who died in the NATO bombing of hijacked oil-tankers were not Taliban, and that some civilians were also ‘wounded’ there. I am sure we will be told pretty soon that some civilians also died in this…

The Prophet and His Message : “Force when necessary, love all the time.” (Naguib Mahfooz) On a hot July afternoon in 1991, I climbed Mount Hira. Compared to towering Himalayas of Pakistan, Hira is no giant, but the climb was made hard by my pilgrim’s sandals and the intense heat. It is a barren, forbidding…